” Oh, I wish I could draw.  I can’t even draw a straight line.”

This is the most common thing people remark when they ask what I do. I have heard it countless times. I want to tell them that there is no magic, just a certain passion, a calling perhaps. There is rarely a way to make a living wage outside of the commercial art world, so passion or a calling are the only things that compel you to make art. You do it because you simply don’t know who or how else to be. And that applies to dance, music, writing or any of the fine arts.

But people so often fail to connect their natural creativity and how it intersects with their daily lives. Making a beautiful birthday cake. Laying out a garden. Singing songs to your children. Restoring a classic car.  A disciplined yoga practice. It’s those daily moments in life that require no ruler whatsoever that makes us all artists to a certain degree. It’s the fine art of living that is available to all of us everyday.

And that brings me back to the ‘straight line’ comment. I want to tell them, that’s the beauty of being an artist – you don’t have to ever draw a straight line. It can be a curved line. A dotted line. A colored line. A digital line. But make your life line, using whatever tool or medium you choose.

“Your job is to draw a line from your life to your art that is straight and clear.”  (from ART & FEAR)

BEYOND HERE THERE ARE DRAGONS!                                                                                  

This is what old map makers would write at the edges of maps when new worlds were yet to be discovered. When they still worried that sailing beyond known boundaries might have them falling off the edges of the known world. The fear of the unknown was fearsome dragons … proceed at your own peril. Or for the few who could not resist the call of adventure, proceed at your own risk and wonder.

It’s like that with art. You can give yourself a million reasons to quit. I don’t have a gallery. I don’t have a studio. I haven’t sold anything in years. I can’t make a living on it. That guys work is so much better. I’ll never be famous. The excuse list goes on and on.

You quit because you have convinced yourself you are already doomed to failure.

Beyond here are dragons! I will stay in the known, safe world. The world that has already been charted and mapped out – by others.

Making art is much about repetition. The repetition of starting over, again and again. Idea, after idea. Voyage after voyage into the unknown of a blank canvas. An empty sheet of music. An expanse of dance floor. How do you tell your story over and over again, each time with fresh eyes and something new to say? It’s daunting, like peering at the the edge of a horizon, the edge of the map, the boundaries of what is known into that which is yours to discovery.

    ”   VISION IS ALWAYS AHEAD OF EXECUTION.  “

…” for most art, there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated; that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world.”  ( from ART & FEAR )

Art has been my life’s education. It has shown me my shortcomings & failures as well as my victories and successes. It’s never deserted me as long as I was willing to go to the edge of the map looking for dragons. And so it is with life. Whether you are living the life of an artist or not, we have to slay our own dragons. Become a mapmaker for your life and go beyond where the dragons are. You will learn far more about yourself than you ever could have imagined.

I’m standing in my garage looking at everything that was previously in my Reno studio. The sight of my ‘ art stuff ‘ relegated to a cold , dirty, dark, garage makes my head hurt. It’s a nightmare begging for organization. By choice I have given my studio space up to my step-son while he finishes his last year of college.

I have been without a studio before, so I am not terrorized by the loss of the work space itself, rather the assembled stacks of what I have deemed  necessities to create art. My first inclination is to pitch it all. My second is to organize it and find a way to walk out there and find it a pleasing environment. My third is simply to spend the year creating art outside of the studio. I am choosing the third option, though it will still necessitate me organizing the nightmare somewhat.

It’s easy to get too comfortable with our life. Stay in a routine … after all as humans we naturally look for patterns to organize our life around. So throwing my creative environment up in the air and seeing where it will land is alot like standing on a piece of ice as you feel it breaking away from the shore line. Still, I am, as is my wont, more excited about how I will adapt to the year rather than losing what was and standing outside of my comfort zone.

We get used to having  the familiar around us. It comforts us. It can also make us lazy. Forced out of the routine I created in my comfortable studio, I am now going back to the spontaneity of life drawing, location painting, photography and letting the outside world become my inspiration again rather than creating from within the walls of my studio. It’s suddenly exciting again to be working within a living , breathing event as it happens. And this summer when it’s time again for camping, the woods will be my studio. In truth, it’s like a rebirth of wonder to be free of the studio and engaged in the world outside.

So, I’m rolling with it. Do you have something in your path that seems like an obstacle? Life is now in session – don’t waste a minute of it.

You still have choices – go left or go right … or roll away the stone.

I have always loved organizational principles. It’s one of the things I love about the process of creating a piece of art – organizing both my ideas and the technical constructs of how I am going to communicate my idea through the work. One of my canvas collages from the TO END IS TO BEGIN series is entitled, PEARLS of WISDOM. The piece is about the many, many ways there are of embracing higher principals. Or as Stevie Wonder said in his beautiful song…Higher Ground.

They say, with practice, adherence to higher principals instead of personal prejudices can become second nature. For instance, you could practice a different value each day of the week. This great weekly approach is from Dr. Amit Sood chair of the Mayo Mind Body Initiative

 Monday : GRATITUDE – find 5 things to be grateful for.

Tuesday : COMPASSION – intend to decrease pain & suffering throughout your day, recognizing that everyone experiences pain, loss and suffering.

Wednesday : ACCEPTANCE – live your day by accepting yourself as you are and others as they are.

Thursday : MEANING & PURPOSE – with some humility and perspective, focus on the ultimate meaning and purpose of your life.

Friday : FORGIVENESS –  start by forgiving yourself for past mistakes and then move on to others.

Saturday : CELEBRATION –  celebrate your life and the lives of those around you, savor the joy that brings.

Sunday : REFLECTION – This may be through prayer, meditation or simply awareness.

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And there you have a weeks worth of mindful living in the moment.

Mindfulness is a way of life … and life can be full of meaning , purpose and joy. And that is what PEARLS OF WISDOM is to me.

So my winter migration is complete and I have settled back into my Texas home /studio.

When I’m here, I get to reconnect with printmaking, an art form near and dear to my heart. I actually started out as a printmaking major and was 2 years into the program before I started painting. I ended up with a double major, not being able to choose. I must admit, choosing a major was a real botheration to me as I wanted to keep on playing and exploring as many creative processes as I could. I loved photography and ceramics and it seemed limiting at the time to focus on just one, but that’s the way school works. So I chose painting primarily to learn about color as intimately as possible. And it helped with my printmaking, because you need to know how to mix colors and what layers of colors are going to do to understand what will happen on a print. Unlike painting, there is a great deal of thinking ahead and I liked the process and discipline of that thought process. My favorite form of printmaking is the monotype – the most painterly of printmaking types, and that makes sense for me, considering my love of painting. The spontaneity suits me, the painterly feel as well. But unlike a painting, the surprise element when you pull a print off the press ,for better or for worse, it’s never quite exactly what you thought you were going to get. And when it’s better than  what you anticipated, it’s like Christmas morning – both  a wonder and a surprise.

These are the things I most appreciate about making art and it’s a mirror of how I like to live my life. Filled with wonder and surprise. Migrating back and forth like this shakes  up my routines , forces me to be in a different mind set and environment, seeing again with fresh eyes. We need to give ourselves time and space to play and expose ourselves to a place or space where the unpredictable can happen.

” For whatever you’re doing for your creative juices, your geography has a hell of a lot to do with it. “Neil Young

As an artist, it’s both frustrating and humbling to constantly be reminded how futile it is to try to beat nature at creating beautiful things. All efforts seem so futile when you look closely at the simplest of things … the patterns on a seashell, the colors of a bird’s feathers, the clouds overhead. I use nature as my teacher and every day is again a reminder there is simply no way to learn these wonders in such a short time. It’s like always being in kindergarten.

I remain always on my knees in appreciation of the wondrous beauty of it all.

If someone or something always gets the last word, let it be Mother Nature. What good and lovely hands to be in, from the beginning to the end.

(featured photo by Catherine Massaro)

We’re having a heat wave. Should be over 100 for the next 3 or 4 days. I’m waiting to see if it breaks a record in Death Valley as they are predicting. If you have never driven through Death Valley, though I would not recommend you go now (February is nice!) it’s a wonderful surprise, and very ‘desert’ beautiful. Plus you get to stand at the lowest spot below sea level in the U.S. The starkness of a desert landscape is so beautiful to me and I took so many pictures of the sand dunes. But it’s not for everyone. All of nature is beautiful to me though – I have yet to find a corner of this country that I did not find beauty in. Or maybe it’s through an artists’ eye, because after all … being an artist is all about noticing things.

(photograph by Catherine Massaro)

A most beautiful excerpt from my favorite new book, “When Women Were Birds” by Terry Tempest Williams.

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

( canvas collage by CATHERINE MASSARO, “Bird on the Wire”)

Home is ACCEPTANCE.

(monoprint and photograph by Catherine Massaro)